How is the Pennsylvania economy performing from the perspective of regular workers? Pretty well.
This blog will focus on on the simplest and most widely used measure of our economy’s performance: job growth. As with today’s report on inflation in January (down to 3.1% over the past 12 months), the news is good.
Pennsylvania now has 6.18 million jobs, 87,000 more (in December 2023) than right before the pandemic (in February 2020). We have fully recovered from the short but deep pandemic recession.
One indicator of the strength of recent Pennsylvania job growth is how it compares with U.S. job growth.
Usually, Pennsylvania job growth is less than half U.S. job growth – because our working-age population grows more slowly than the U.S. working age population. Since the year 2000, for example, the number of Pennsylvania jobs grew by less than half the number of U.S. jobs (9% versus 20%).
In the past 45 months, in every 12-month span starting April 2020 or later, Pennsylvania’s job growth has been at least 75% of U.S. job growth. For the past five months, Pennsylvania job growth in the previous year has exceeded U.S. job growth.
In the first part of the chart above, starting with the April 2020 to April 2021 12-month period, rapid Pennsylvania job growth compared to U.S. stemmed from our big job decline from February to April 2020 (18.6% versus 14.4% in the U.S.). Since we lost a bigger chunk of our jobs in the short pandemic recession, we had more ground to make up. Since Pennsylvania’s high job relative to the U.S. has now gone on for 45 months, it could reflect the start of a longer-term positive trend.
Whatever its roots, Pennsylvania’s recent job growth has gone along with a historically low unemployment rate and with a situation in which Pennsylvania has many more job openings than unemployed workers – a situation that gives workers, individually and collectively, more power than they have had in the labor market in a long time.